@Work: Jimmy Bohanon

CO-OWNER, BOHANON & ASSOCIATES LAND SURVEYORS

Published: Sunday, March 3, 2013 at 7:51 p.m.

Last Modified: Sunday, March 3, 2013 at 7:51 p.m.

Why he started the business: “I was working for another surveyor and he came up to me one day and asked if I knew that I was qualified to get my license. I had been surveying for 12 years so I looked into it, and the survey exam is compared as being harder than the bar exam — it’s a three-day, eight hour-a-day test. So after passing the test, I got a business partner and opened Absolute Land Surveying, which I had for 10 years. It had gotten to the point where we had 32 employees, but then the economy bottomed out and we couldn’t afford to have two owners, so that’s when I decided to open Bohanon & Associates.”

Jimmy Bohanon is a co-owner of Bohanon & Associates Land Surveying, and is seen in the studio at the Ocala Star-Banner on Friday, March 1, 2013.

Jacqui Janetzko/Star-Banner Correspondent

How they dealt with the economy: “It’s been interesting; we had to hit the pavement hard and got down to the grassroots of what we can do to make it in the community. It’s service-based, you have to go that extra mile. In ‘04, there was so much work you could actually turn it away, but now you have to go above and beyond and do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. They can order through our website and we can give them service they don’t have to worry about and know it will be done in two or three days. We had to diversify, we went from mortgage surveying for private homes and farms to a lot of engineering work, expansions, a water main in Palm Cay, a water main extension in Salt Springs, and different projects for the city and county.”

What a surveyor does: “We are interpreting the engineering plans to real life, from the paper to the ground. The surveyor has to tell builders where to put a building, how high it goes, where the road begins and where it turns, divides out individual lots in subdivisions, and if somebody decided they want to cut off a piece of property, how it is described and where it goes.”

How he got started: “In tenth grade I was taking algebra and I told (my teacher) this was dumb, that letters and numbers don’t mix and I will never use this in life. Here comes the ironic part — I use it every day. My senior year, I worked in a co-op program where you could go to school for a half day and work half a day. I got a job working for a surveyor in Lake Placid, then Orlando, and worked two years for Disney, which was some of the most interesting surveying I’ve ever done. You’re laying out the rides and the last project I worked on was the Dumbo ride. You had to locate all the beams because of all the tunnels underneath—you have to make sure the engineers know where everything is at to design and (place) thousands of pounds of a ride on top of a tunnel.”

Best part of the job: “You are retracing steps of an older surveyor, the original person that divided up all of the land, and it’s almost like a research mission when you go out collecting evidence — where it is supposed to be divided, why the lot is where it is and if it is correct. Every once in a while you can find a corner that was set 100 years ago, a pile of stones in a corner, a blaze mark in a tree, or an old petrified piece of wood.”

What people don’t know: “The biggest misconception is that people ask me if I’m the one standing in the road taking pictures. But the instrument you see on a tripod is not a camera, it’s called a total station. You are measuring angles and distances—it shoots a laser to a prism that bounces back and records the time that it takes. It does it 100s of times a second, and it’s accurate to a 5,000th of a foot.”

Have an idea for a business profile? Contact Jacqui Janetzko, Star-Banner correspondent, at jacqui.janetzko@gmail.com.

<p><b>Why he started the business: </b> “I was working for another surveyor and he came up to me one day and asked if I knew that I was qualified to get my license. I had been surveying for 12 years so I looked into it, and the survey exam is compared as being harder than the bar exam — it's a three-day, eight hour-a-day test. So after passing the test, I got a business partner and opened Absolute Land Surveying, which I had for 10 years. It had gotten to the point where we had 32 employees, but then the economy bottomed out and we couldn't afford to have two owners, so that's when I decided to open Bohanon & Associates.”</p><p><b>How they dealt with the economy: </b> “It's been interesting; we had to hit the pavement hard and got down to the grassroots of what we can do to make it in the community. It's service-based, you have to go that extra mile. In '04, there was so much work you could actually turn it away, but now you have to go above and beyond and do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. They can order through our website and we can give them service they don't have to worry about and know it will be done in two or three days. We had to diversify, we went from mortgage surveying for private homes and farms to a lot of engineering work, expansions, a water main in Palm Cay, a water main extension in Salt Springs, and different projects for the city and county.”</p><p><b>What a surveyor does: </b> “We are interpreting the engineering plans to real life, from the paper to the ground. The surveyor has to tell builders where to put a building, how high it goes, where the road begins and where it turns, divides out individual lots in subdivisions, and if somebody decided they want to cut off a piece of property, how it is described and where it goes.”</p><p><b>How he got started: </b> “In tenth grade I was taking algebra and I told (my teacher) this was dumb, that letters and numbers don't mix and I will never use this in life. Here comes the ironic part — I use it every day. My senior year, I worked in a co-op program where you could go to school for a half day and work half a day. I got a job working for a surveyor in Lake Placid, then Orlando, and worked two years for Disney, which was some of the most interesting surveying I've ever done. You're laying out the rides and the last project I worked on was the Dumbo ride. You had to locate all the beams because of all the tunnels underneath—you have to make sure the engineers know where everything is at to design and (place) thousands of pounds of a ride on top of a tunnel.”</p><p><b>Best part of the job: </b> “You are retracing steps of an older surveyor, the original person that divided up all of the land, and it's almost like a research mission when you go out collecting evidence — where it is supposed to be divided, why the lot is where it is and if it is correct. Every once in a while you can find a corner that was set 100 years ago, a pile of stones in a corner, a blaze mark in a tree, or an old petrified piece of wood.”</p><p><b>What people don't know: </b> “The biggest misconception is that people ask me if I'm the one standing in the road taking pictures. But the instrument you see on a tripod is not a camera, it's called a total station. You are measuring angles and distances—it shoots a laser to a prism that bounces back and records the time that it takes. It does it 100s of times a second, and it's accurate to a 5,000th of a foot.”</p><p><i>Have an idea for a business profile? Contact Jacqui Janetzko, Star-Banner correspondent, at jacqui.janetzko@gmail.com.</i></p>